Reimaging Unstructured Storage Platform Upgrade Experience
UX Designer | 5 months Remote Internship | Enterprise product designUser Research
Due to the complexity of the product and the scope of this project, I spent 1.5 months learning and conducting foundational research. I interviewed more than a dozen of internal “dog-fooding“ storage admins, remote support service engineers, and external customers. Additionally, I also got multiple product designers outside of my organization for a focus group sharing their perspectives and lessons learned on designing for upgrades.
Research Process
Research Findings
User Group
Main Painpoints
Performing an upgrade faces many risks of negative impact on storage’s production efficacy, and chances of losing data when a node doesn’t come back up during a reboot process. Users often hesitate about performing an upgrade
01 Low visibility of system status during an upgrade
User don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes
The image on the left shows how the current GUI looks like when there are errors during an upgrade process. It gives very little and unclear information.
User felt unsure about whether things are going okay
The current interface easily causes concerns, confusion, and panics because of its poor information.
02 Troubleshooting is difficult
Error messages are hard to find and it’s not easy to understand
Image on the left shows how the troubleshooting messages getting presented in the Command Line Interface.
Error messages are not helpful in finding solutions
Messages on the left is repetitive and is still pushing users away — “please refer to KB#542999 for more information.“
User Journey Mapping
— Old Workflow —
Based on the current upgrade workflow on OneFS, I mapped out each stage of user’s journey with major pain points I discovered through user interviews and performing upgrades on my own.
— My Proposed New Workflow —
Based on my design principles and observations of competitor’s upgrade process, I ideated and designed a new workflow for OneFS upgrade.
